Pope Francis: how Buenos Aires made the man

Not so long ago, Pope Francis was a simple Argentine Cardinal who went by the name of Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Andrew West investigates how the Pope's hometown of Buenos Aires shaped the man who now leads one billion Catholics worldwide.

Along the grand boulevards of Buenos Aires, and in the cosy plazas of the up-market neighbourhoods of Palermo and Recoleta, it's easy to miss what the Argentines call the 'villa de miseria'.

Translated roughly, they are 'misery villages' or shantytowns. Some are in the shadow of the domestic airport, close to the inner city, others tucked behind the main railway station.

He was and is close to Peronism because Peronism is a popular movement. If you want to be close to the masses, you have to be Peronist.

Pedro Brieger, academic and broadcaster

When Pope Francis was simply Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he would visit these communities regularly. One of his biographers, Paul Vallely, says he was known as the 'Bishop of the slums'.

Francis was certainly not a radical in Latin American political and religious terms. He lived modestly in a small downtown flat but he did not live, as some fellow Jesuits did, among the poorest. And while he embraced the Catholic Church's preferential option for the poor, he rejected the class struggle tinge that came with liberation theology.

But Hilary Burke—an American journalist who has spent the past 12 years in Buenos Aires and co-authored the recent Time magazine cover story declaring Francis 'Person of the Year'—says the slums made a deep impression on him and his attitude to economics.

'These particular slums—villa de miseria—are sort of off the grid,' she says. 'So they don't have basic services, such as electricity or sewage and they tend to be, in Buenos Aires, home to a lot of immigrants from neighbouring countries.'

'I think part of what he must have learned is how unfair the system is, the economic system, just in the fact that this kind of poverty exists. This is a very wealthy country.'

If you look deeper than the anecdotes about the cardinal who travelled among the sweaty crowds on the Buenos Aires subway, you can see how the life of Buenos Aires shaped the current Pope.

Francis was not born into poverty but lower middle class austerity. His family neighbourhood, Flores, was austere but the streets were clean, the kitchen tables full, and children played on the pavements and filled the classrooms.

For much of the 20th century, Argentina had one of the highest standards of living in the world, largely because of the strength of its middle class. The post-war government of Juan Peron—and the movement that he and his wife Eva, or Evita, spawned—strengthened the labour movement and laid the basis of a welfare state.

'Peronism' has clearly influenced Francis, insists one of Argentina's leading scholars and broadcasters, Pedro Brieger. 'He was and is close to Peronism because Peronism is a popular movement,' Brieger said. 'If you want to be close to the masses, you have to be Peronist.'

For much of 1980s and 1990s, Argentine governments, especially that of Carlos Menem, subscribed to the 'Washington consensus'; cutting budgets and subsidies, and privatising state assets and services. The wealthy invested in US dollars but when the bust came in 2001, it was devastating for the middle class. Their savings disappeared overnight. They took to the streets.

Francis, then Cardinal Bergoglio, witnessed this tumult. The fate of not just the poor, but the middle class on which broad prosperity had been built, lodged in his consciousness. It helped shape his attitude to economics, which we now see in his writings and pronouncements.

In May last year, soon after he became Pope, he called on the world's leaders to end 'the cult of money'. In December, he released a papal exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel, laced with strong criticisms of free market dogma. 'While the earnings of the minority are growing exponentially, so, too, is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few,' he wrote.

'The imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. It is vital that government leaders and financial leaders take heed and broaden their horizons, working to ensure that all citizens have dignified work, education and healthcare.'